His mum had been a nurse, working in a home for disabled children. Blue used to go in and help her out sometimes in the school holidays. At first he’d been nervous and shy, uneasy, but he’d soon realized that, apart from those one or two kids with really severe learning difficulties, they were just like any other kids. They had the same thoughts and interests as him. Just like in any other group of kids there were show-offs, jokers, quiet ones, clever ones, thick ones, cool ones and arseholes. It made no difference what they looked like, or how they spoke, whether they were in wheelchairs or had neck braces or whatever – kids were kids. In the end he’d made a couple of good friends there. He’d got used to their disabilities, stopped noticing them in most cases.

This was way different. He’d never seen kids like these before. There were the girl and boy they’d spotted downstairs, him with tiny legs and a huge round spider body, her with an impossibly thin frame and a head that looked like a huge round ball. Then there was another girl with legs that looked to be over a metre long and a tiny body on the top. Another boy had a lower leg and foot that had grown into what looked like a long, wide blob. Another girl, who Blue was very careful not to stare at, seemed to have her guts growing on the outside of her body, covered by a thin, almost transparent membrane. One girl had what appeared to be a normal body but a strange, fishlike head, with the eyes pushed round to the sides and a wide, wet mouth.

Perhaps the strangest of all were what he’d at first thought were a normal boy and girl. When he’d realized that they were actually fused together, and that there was a third body growing out of their backs that looked lifeless and shrivelled, he had actually gasped. He knew they couldn’t be conjoined twins, because you couldn’t have conjoined twins of different sexes, and he’d certainly never heard of conjoined triplets.

No. This was impossible. It was too much to take in. These kids weren’t disabled. It was more like they were a different species. Monsters, Seamus had called them, but they were human, weren’t they?

They were children.